stupid stuff we have done, and survived...

Friends of mine used to sneak up on competitors pit and drop an M-8O into the empty Nitro barrel. Ever see a 55 gal drum fly? Not sure if the statute of limitations has run out so I won't say they worked on Jeb Allen's T/F crew. Oooops! As if drag racing weren't dangerous enough…

This is a fun thread. Chock full of BAD ideas.

;-)

 

My wife and I were talking and I've come to realize that I have, as she puts it "more stupid stories than smart ones". I say I have just enough smart stories to be able to tell the stupid ones!
One night leaving the bank my fuel pump died. After hitchin rides to the parts store for pump and tool set (before I gathered enough crap to rebuild a car on the side of the road in my trunk tool box) I find out I have no flashlight and it's dark. No problem..I've got a lighter. So there I am on the side of the road with a homeless guy that decided to help out (homeless people are pretty damn cool sometimes) using the light from a Bic in one hand swappin pumps. All went well but I couldn't see that the gasket was only half on. Emptied the crankcase on the way home. Damn I was lucky that night since I didn't even cook the motor or blow me and the car up. That's one of my mildest...
Then there's the illegal stuff that I don't have the room for involving playing sniper with a .22 and passing cars..REAL effing stupid. Launching M-80's from slingshots into backyards..blah blah blah.
One day welding up a '66 riv chop I decide to clean the tip of the gun by running wire through and opening the hole up. It was fine until that wire struck the grounded roof. The wire lit up across the palm of my hand and hurt like hell.
I've got some skate ones, too. Like waking up pretzeled in the gutter after bombing a hill with loose trucks. I remember getting speed wobbles and I remember waking up..nothing in between.

 

Seadoo that would do 55mph
Truck inner tube
50 feet of rope
1/2 gallon of Maker's Mark
Alligator infested lake

the only thing we didn't have was daylight.

 

Id'n that called trollin' ?

 

married my first wife, she was an idiot but had big tits and could suck start a harley, had to trade her in as her nose candy habiy killed my car budget.

 

there was the time me and my brother would get into my dads reloading supplies when we was no more than 10 or 12, well we was having fun with smokeless powder in a bowl and matches but we didn't get the lingering smoke we had hoped for so we stepped it up to blackpowder, we'd fill a cereal bowl and chuck matches at it but wouldn't go so we'd take turns getting closer and closer finally I ended up hunkered over the bowl dropping matches in and finally in frustration I lit a match and jabbed it into the powder and WHOOSH! I lost both eyebrows and all the hair on the front half of the top of my head no way to hide the hair and with pa due home anytime I had no choice but to try and blame my brother but him being the younger one and my dad not buying any of it he proceeded to peel some hide of me with the handle of an old homemade sap he built

I was maybe a little younger and was trying to take a 22 bullet apart with 2 pairs of visegrips but only succeeded in setting the bullet off, to this day I think that was my closest brush with death cause I had it clamped in one and my foot on it and lifting and twisting with the my arms with the other

there are days I don't look forward to my 2 boys having their own experiences
I hope they pull thru as well and live to talk about them cause I know their turns coming and not a darn thing a person can do except putting them in a bubble and locking them away

 

I've got a little girl that I hope wil see through the humor I build into my stories when I tell them and see the lesson but sometimes it's all by experience.
BTW, if you want lingering smoke, break a couple M-80's in half, dump the sulpher(?) in a pile and light it. that REALLY gets people's attention at 1 in the morning! Bright and smokey!

 

Oh man, I have so many stupid stories. People that know me now, but not as youngin' find it hard to believe because I'm pretty conservative now. But I wised up. We did the pulling discs behind trucks in snow, shoe skiing behind cars, etc. But one of the dumbest things we did was what we called car surfing. You can probably guess how you'd do it, but we'd do it drunk too. Pisses me off how stupid I was. I remember one time being so drunk, but wanting to do it so bad, but I couldn't even stand. Thank god my buddy was less drunk and just went real slow. Anyway, he gives me shit because I was laying on the hood of his car (I couldn't stand) and said I had to pee. I whipped it out and peed all down the side of his car (and me)! When he saw that, he'd had enough and jerked the wheel and off the hood I flew.
Another game we played was more fun. On the highway we'd take tennis balls and see how far forward we could chuck them and then catch them. We actually got pretty good at it.
We used to do stupid things to try and cause wrecks, like water down the road on a sub freezing night and sit with lawn chairs waiting for someone to crash-right in front of our house! Duh, would they not figure that out? Fortunately that plan never worked.
My buddy used to drive his mom's '76 Lebaron. It had a mopar 360, so it was fairly peppy given what Detroit was offering at the time. Anyway, there was a long straight road with a hump in it near by. Every Friday night we would see how far we could jump it. We fucked up that car in no time. His mom never had a clue.

 

My friends and I have had appetites for mucho fireworks and alcohol. Caffeine, alacohol, fireworks, home made explosives and all sorts of other stuff. This one night we decided to blow up a pop can with gun powder my friend got from his older brother. We all had aluminum in our legs...A few hours later we decided to stick gun powder in every orifice of a busted tv...take that soccer field!
Getting extremely drunk and putting a road flare on the back of a scooter for ROCKET BOOST is just about the best thing there is to do in all the world...melting holes into shit is just about the shit too.
One time last year a friend of mine, AFTER seeing alive at twenty five special at school, we packed a subaru full of nine kids and drove around town causing all sorts of trouble. Donuts on lawns are amazing at 3 am. It was pretty funny, because not only were we driving in a car that had 9 people in it, but the driver himself was drunk and getting advice from myself. "You know how you take right turns?" "How?" he asked..."By speeding the fuck up, going over the curb and honking" Not only did he do that, but he wound that fucker up to 7 grand after the turn and just sped away.
Good thing none of us were into car surfing!

 

Cutting out my driveline tunnel the other day with an angle grinder. No big deal, but it's nice to see what's on the other side of the material you're cutting when throwing 4' sparks. Almost done with the cut, see a sizzling liquid coming up, you guessed it...the fuel line. No boom though. Just a lesson learned.

OH, and my annual 4th of July patented homemade "sparkler hat"

 

There was this one time at band camp.....

 

I was at a buddies house one night and we decided to fire up the gas grill and burn some burgers. I was inside on the phone and he came back in and said he forgot the matches. No biggie, it happens. Next thing I heard was a loud "wooosh" followed by "HOLY SHIT!!" I ran outside to see my buddy standing there with singed eyebrows and mustache. Turns out he left the gas on and the lid closed when he went in to get the matches.

For car related, when in high school,three of us were hood surfing one night on Main Street. Some girl was driving and one of my buddies decides to stand up and "ride it out" He was wearing cowboy boots, but he never fell. After a couple of passes it was cool and we were brave. That is until we saw some headlights and thought it was the town cop. We were trying to get off the car when the front tire grabbed my buddies pant leg and pulled him off the car. On his way off he grabbed me but I didn't catch him. He wound up sliding under a car parked at the local bar. He ended up with internal injuries. He told his mom that he got rammed by a steer in Ag class and she believed him.

Also in high school, I delivered parts for an auto supply house. Well we found a "short cut" to one of our delivery spots that involved a dirt road and railroad tracks. You can get air in a Jeep pickup if you go fast enough over those tracks. After telling my buddy about it, he came back and told me that you could get a GMC 1500 in the air to. The boss couldn'e figure out why the front ends of the company trucks always had to be aligned.

 

Shiets brah!, this is turning out to way to entertaining, I have to get to work here some time.

My boss relayed a story about how late one night he was pulling into his shop where every one was supposed to be working. Intead he could not find anyone ...but he could hear the laughing at the other end, out side of the shop. So he calmly walks down to where he hears the noises coming from. What he sees is, his crew standing around laughing at, some guy had made a launcher ramp out of angle iron and strap and was laying acetylene bottles on it and whacking the valves off w/ sledge hammers and seeing how far they would fly before landing in the Carquinez Straights, apparently they went quite far . (I don't know how far the employee went though)

I am glad to know that you all are enjoying this thread, cause I was crying I was laughing so hard.

 

I did get married once.That was real stupid!!

 

I think you mean oxygen bottles, I'm pretty sure they flew a coupla hundred feet.

 

Yah - I think that's what he meant. You hafta have 'em pointed in the right direction and some sorta guidance, or they whap around inside the shop and make a helluva racket...

or so I've heard.

 

i never actually got to ride on one of the sleds 'cause i had a corvair and it got around in the snow better than any of my friends' cars so i was always driving. we tied multiple sleds behind; front of one to the back of the one in front of it with about 10 feet of rope. with 5 or 6 sleds tied this way the guy in the rear really got to whipping side to side. never got anyone hurt, but did destroy some sleds. did you know that the runners and supports will fold up just like a card house if you put enough side force on them?

 

When my dad was 16, he got a job at a local dealership in the body shop. His second day there, he was "initiated" by being drug into the paint booth and getting painted blue.

He had to take a bath in lacquer thinner, he said that hurt more than anything he's done in his life.

The next week, the body shop manager (his boss - and the ringleader of the guys that painted him) went to take a leak in the porta-john. My dad ran outside to get his '56 Chevy and drove it up to the door. He was just gonna park it there and rev the engine, but he realized pretty soon that he could push the guy all around the shop on the dusty concrete...

 

Once I...Wait, anybody here an expert on statutes of limitation, Federal and Maryland???

Well, I heard once...

Let's say this was a bad dream, OK???

My faithful beagle and I stopped for gas near a scary rat's ass of a shopping center near...an unnamed ugly city. This was kinda a challenge, because I live in New Jersey, one of the last places without pump-your-own gas. We hire furriners here to pump our gas for us...so, working a gas pump was something of a challenge. I carefully read the instructions and grabbed a hose...half a tank later, as I idly wondered why this was the only pump hose I had seen in a decade without the big rubber boot thing, a woman stuck her head out of the cashier's bunker and asked: "Does that old Nova really run on diesel?"
Aiyeeee!!! 2 AM Sunday, a hundred miles from home....
I hopefully topped off the tank with high test and took off...as soon as the new mix reached the carb, the whole world disappeared behind a massive bank of smoke and the knocking began. Even if the car could make it, the first cop who could find me would probably jail me as a public hazard.
I chugged and clanged around the big parking lot, and saw at its low point a big drain grating in a dark place, with grass island on two sides...
Hmmmmm....
The dog came out of the car on her leash as cover, in case any cruising gestapo wondered why I was parked way out on the edge of nothing in the middle of the night..."Just draining my dog, officer! No idea what that gurgling and smell is, sir!"
A quick rummage through the shrapnel in the trunk produced an Okie credit card and a 2 gallon tank of mower gas. Diesel mix to drain! Gurglegurglegurgle! Gas can on ground as more cover...just putting in my spare gas so I can get 200 yards to station, officer.
Soon, the evil stinkstuff was heading for the Chesapeake (sorry about the oyster shortage--they'll grow back someday...), and I dumped in my gas can to dilute the remaining sludge. I chugged into a different gas station and fillederup--back to the world alive!
Wierd, the stuff I can imagine when my lawyer isn't around...I should write a book about the things I absolutely did not do...

 

I flipped a car doing 120mph, skid across 4 lanes of traffic and walked away with a scrape....and I wasn't wearing a seatbelt
I've done countless other stupid things but I'd rather not incriminate myself

 

My grandfather saw one shoot through 3 cinderblock walls, he wasn't the kinda guy to exagerate.

Hmmm, here are summaries of some of my favorites
- Sour milk in the WS washer resevoir, turn the squirters 90 degrees, spray people coming out of grocery store and drive-thru windows.
- Blue flashing light bungeed to roof of moms AMC, go for a ride, end up at Tampa Intl' Airport parking garage (pre 9/11 by about 20 years), pulled over for impersonating an officer.
- Bottle rocket fights
- Grapefruit fights (windows broken, garage doors dented)
- Banzai run through a grapefruit orchard in a '76 Coupe DeVille
- Tried to "burn" freshly laid sod on a rainy day with Mom's AMC.
- Snorting aspirin (alcohol involved, like you didn't see that coming)
- Throwing "skinned" nerf footballs (8-10 guys), soaked in muddy water at passing cars.
- Using smoke bombs to melt every single one of my dad's lifetime collection of model cars.
- fiberglassing a re-shaped surfboard skeg to the back of a local box turtle.
- paper bag filled with flour hanging above the road at night, about windshield height then hanging around to see results.

 

That's one of the benefits of being a middle-aged old fart:

a) You've outlived a buncha people you pissed off
b) The shit you broke/stole/burned is either been sent off to the scrap heap or bulldozed over in the name of progress
c) statute of limitations ran out.

 

Yep--but I've never figured out how any gearhead ever lived past age 17.
I can only marvel at the sheer number of heavy/hot/sharp/hypervelocity metal objects that have missed my vitals by about .000012".

 

Here's a couple with pictures. First one, buddy of mine is drunk at a hunting cabin and has me and a friend come about 2 hours to help him because he's stuck. Get there to find out that when he was drunk, he decided to drive his truck up a huge snow-cliff so that he wouldn't be tempted to drive back to the bars in town. The one pic is of my fat ass inspecting the truck and trying to figure out how the S-10 we brought was going to pull him out.

 

This one is going to take the dumb-ass trophy. I can't believe I forgot I had pictures of this. Not much setup needed, I was scrapping out an Audi parts car and it didn't drive anymore so I figured I'd push it onto my car trailer. No alcohol was involved and no one else was around to stop me. Here's what happened.

 

umm..yer s'posta take the audi outta park first.

it IS funny...

 

Ramps were too steep and the front bumper caught before the wheels started to go up. These pics were taken after I tried frantically to back the plow truck out from under the car. When it hit, the back bumper of the Audi was completely on top of the Ramcharger's hood. All that mud didn't help get the truck unstuck, either.

 

4t64rd reminded me of a funny story of a bottle rocket fight we had once. We were cruising in my buddies Pinto wagon (stop laughing, it was his first car and a freebie at that! ). We came upon three other guys, whom we did not recognize, in the middle of this shopping mall parking lot that was abandoned. We park around the corner and sneak up on them and start firing bottle rockets. The first one shot under their car and popped about 25 feet on the other side. They had no clue where it came from and were looking completely in the wrong direction for the culprits. So we load up again and the next one went off right under their car. They turned around and spied us. We were busted. They don't even run after us, but instead jump in their car (a Toyota SR5 wagon) to run us down. We bolted to the Pinto and started to flee. We were racing up and down these quiet suburban neighborhood at like 60 miles an hr (that about all these dogs of a car had!). The guy behind us had these amber flashing lights, and we were laughing our asses off at that. So, next thing we do is open the wagon hatch and prop it up (it wouldn't stay up by itself). Well, we started firing bottle rockets out the back. They would hit their windshield and their car would swerve. You could see the passenger getting thrown around and then recover and beat on the dash board as if to encourage the little four banger to giddy up! that chase seemed to go on forever, it was funnier than hell. It looked like some cheesy movie car chase scene!

 

I knew a guy who once knew a guy who did this...

Hows about try to jump a rusted out junker 69' Sport Fury over some railroad tracks. We knew it has rusted badly...we knew the rear frame rails were completely rotted out, but man would that 383 hum.

Get her up to about 90 as we come to the tracks, WHOMP! Lots of air, and we are even going straight! TWING! What the hell was that?

KA-WHAM! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Look behind as we grind to a stop, and see 300 feet of flame - gun it and get nothing but the engine stalls as it drains the float bowl on the carb. Its getting stinky and hot in the car so we bail out ans the flames start coming out from under the car.

The rear springs, axle, tires, etc came OUT of the car while we were in midair and landed all by their lonesome int he ditch. We landed on the gas tank which split at the seam and sprayed high pressure gas all over the road as the car ground to a stop . The sparks ignited it.

We had to explain to the police and firemen how we manged to get that far with no rear axle and why the rear axle was sitting in the ditch.

I still have the 3.23 geared pumpkin from that car in my Dart!

 

in our neck of the woods it was hedge apple fights; same results. usually on hallowen night.

there was the time that several of us were in the back of Freddy ---'s father's pickup (bed floor covered with hedge apples) when we went around a tear-drop turn around in the city park and John --- disappeared. turns out he was sitting on the bed rail right over the rear wheel and did a perfect back flip right outta the truck (centrifugal force and all), landed on the ground, and rolled away.

fortunately, young drunk folks usually don't break bones...